Experiments using MEF, MVVM and Silverlight 4 Beta – Part 4: Part Creator

Note – this is a multi part post:

In the last post I’ve updated the MEF MVVM example inserting some PartCreator<T> experiments and I’ve received some feedback about its usage in the ViewModel instance initialization, so I decided to build a new sample in which PartCreator<T> is used to dynamically create objects to be inserted in a collection available in the ViewModel.

The VM instance is now initialized using an import attribute:

/// &lt;summary&gt;
/// Get the ViewModel instance
/// &lt;/summary&gt;
public class ViewModelProvider
{
    public ViewModelProvider() { }

    [ImportMainPageVMAttribute]
    public object mainPageViewModelProvider { get; set; }

    /// &lt;summary&gt;
    /// Get the imported Instance of the ViewModel
    /// &lt;/summary&gt;
    public object GetVMInstance
    {
        get
        {
            PartInitializer.SatisfyImports(this);
            return mainPageViewModelProvider;
        }
    }
}

PartCreator<T> is now used in a new AddDataItemCommand which updates dynamically a collection available in the ViewModel class:

/// &lt;summary&gt;
/// A simple Command to add a new DataItem in the ViewModel collection
/// &lt;/summary&gt;
[PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.NonShared)]
[Export(typeof(ICommand))]
public class AddDataItemCommand : ICommand
{
    public bool CanExecute(object parameter)
    {
        return true;
    }

    public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged;

    public void Execute(object parameter)
    {
        if (parameter != null)
            if (parameter is string)
            {
                var dataItem = DataItemCreator.CreatePart().ExportedValue;
                dataItem.Description = (string)parameter;
                viewModel.dataItems.Add(dataItem);
            }
    }

    [ImportMainPageVMAttribute]
    public MainPageViewModel viewModel { get; set; }

    [Import(typeof(DataItem))]
    public PartCreator&lt;DataItem&gt; DataItemCreator { get; set; }
}

MEF

The source code is available for download here.

Happy Silverlighting!

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 17:53and is filed under .NET Programming, Programming, Rich Internet Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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